A love letter to Vietnam

#1 - Photo Essay

Mar 13, 2024

Photo credit: Best, Sarah. Vietnamese flag. (2016)

Apologies for the radio silence, I’ve been away on holiday for the past couple of weeks and decided not to post. I wasn’t staying in the middle of nowhere without a signal, but I was offline for significant chunks of time as a) my husband and I were travelling around, and b) I refused to pay for roaming. Both of these reasons helped with my decision to reduce (some of) my tech usage while we were away. (My camera didn’t count).

I’m already planning on sharing some more about this trip with you later, along with some photography, but for this post I wanted to revisit somewhere that holds a special place in my heart - Vietnam.

And by revisit, I wanted to share a photo essay that will hopefully tell you a story about some of my experiences in a country that I called home for three years.

Scroll down if you want to jump straight to the photos, but I have included a brief introduction to provide some background as to how I came to live in Vietnam (spoiler – it was for work).

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I moved to Vietnam in 2014 after accepting a job working in an international school. And at that point in my life, the closest geographically that I had been to Vietnam was on a trip to India a few years earlier.

It was a wild decision, and I can still remember the surprise on my parent’s faces when I told them what I was doing, but it still remains one of the best decisions that I ever made and it is something I will share more about in a future post.

Vietnam was also the first place where I found myself drawn to photography. I got my first decent camera phone when I was living there, and so at first I was just using this, but then I realised that I wanted to take this hobby a little further. But in all honesty, I had no idea what I was doing and needed some guidance to get me started.

This guidance came in a few forms; YouTube videos were a great start, as was paying closer attention to artists work that I was drawn too, but when I started working at the school in Vietnam, I connected with the art teacher who’s preferred medium was photography.

Over the years that we worked together, my colleague and now friend taught me how to think about framing, what makes for an interesting image, and even advised me on my first DSLR camera purchase. However, the most important lesson I took away was that you simply have to get out there. Exploration is key. And so my art teacher friend and I would organise photography dates every few months where we take out our bikes and cameras, and ride around a random neighbourhood and shoot. We usually finished these session at a roadside cafe with an ice cold Soda Chanh Muối (a Vietnamese lemonade).

These sessions also taught me that there doesn’t necessarily need to be an agenda with photography (or it could be argued with any art form). If something piques your interest, and you can take a photo (and where appropriate, you have a person’s consent), then take a photo.

So, after that introduction, here are five photos of Vietnam that hopefully tell a story about my time living there.

Photo credit: Best, Sarah. The eyes have it. (2016)

I took this photo on a street photography course in 2016 (a gift from my then-boyfriend, now-husband). This kid was fantastic and the perfect model, pulling a range of expressions and using props such as his bicycle helmet and some prayer beads. In this case, the steady gaze he held was why I chose to share this here over some of the others I took. I also like the contrast of the background (yellow shutter on the right, and the pale blue/green of the wall on the left) as it draws a neat line towards where his hand is held.

Photo credit: Best, Sarah. Fruit seller. (2016)

Another photo from the street photography course. I recall that this lady was particularly patient with me as I tried to fiddle around with the manual settings of what was a new DSLR camera at the time. Again, it’s the eyes that draw me in here. I could have done a lot more with the framing, but a great deal of the joy with street photography is that you don’t have long to set things up. You have to learn to let go and roll with the events that are unfolding, and this in case, the lady was trying to get her fruit stall set up for a day’s work rather than wait around for me to take a photo.

Photo credit: Best, Sarah. The rice paddies of Sa Pa. (2016)

Shortly before I left Vietnam, I did a solo tour of some of the northern parts of the country. I took an overnight train from Hanoi (which was not that conducive for sleeping) to Sa Pa, one of the largest towns in NW Vietnam. After dropping my bags off at the hotel, I was taken for a delicious bowl of chicken phở (Phở Ga) where I met my hiking guide who was a member of the Hmong community. This photo was taken on the first day of my trip where I think we hiked about 20km traversing rice paddies and wandering through mountain villages. If you look closely towards the top right-ish of the image, you can see a huge hotel on one of the hills. I noticed in my short time in Sa Pa there was a great deal of construction under way to accommodate a tourist boom.

Photo credit: Best, Sarah. Hạ Long Bay boat. (2016)

The second half of the same trip to northern Vietnam took me to Hạ Long Bay. Here, I joined a boat tour that took me around some of the islands. It’s hard to put into words the scale of this place, and how these enormous limestone formations frame the landscape. On my first day there, we stopped at one of these islands as this had the advantage of some elevation to survey the area. The boat that you can see was not the one I was sailing on.

It was difficult trying to select the final photo for this post, but in the end I decided to go with this. It’s a noisy image, but one that makes me smile every time and it was something that I probably shouldn’t have taken given that I was riding my bike at the time 😳

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